The Things a Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt Read Free Book Online Page B

room, but I can find out where he’s been.
    Virtualsoldier.com
    Memorialspace.net
    Inthelineofduty.com
    Desertcam.net
    And a long array of sites with detailed maps of the northeastern United States from Boston to the Chesapeake Bay.
    He has an e-mail account, and I know I could figure out how to log in as Boaz, but that, for the time being at least, is a line I can’t cross.
    Maybe I do believe in something after all.

FOUR
    A BBA WAKES ME at eight-thirty.
    Eight-thirty on a Sunday? To make matters worse, I was having a dream about Christina Crowley. All oil-slick slippery with no shred of a plot. The butterfly on her shoulder. Things were just getting good when: “Levi!
Kum!
It’s time we get to that fence!”
    Now it’s nearly two in the afternoon, and I’m covered with sawdust, nowhere near done with the fence and out of things to talk about with Abba. The obvious topic for discussion is why
I’m
out here instead of
Boaz
, when we all know that he’s the one who knows how to fix things. He knows how to work with tools that rattle your limbs and blow out your eardrums. But I just let the electric sander eat up the silences.
    Zim stops by, hoping I’ll go shoot some baskets, which typically involves me sitting down watching him shoot baskets, because any other way is just downright humiliating.
    He beats a quick retreat before Abba enlists him in Project Fence.
    A big storm last winter knocked a branch off our neighbors’tree, which knocked down our fence, which to my sense of order means the neighbors should be the ones out here fixing it, but Abba says their mess is our mess too.
    I hand him a freshly sanded board. He inspects it. Slides his big hands up and down the flat sides. He blows some dust off its edges and nods his approval. I hold it upright while Abba fills a hole in the ground with wet cement. I watch beads of sweat congregate around his bald spot.
    He sticks a post into the hole. He holds it there and I watch him count to thirty under his breath.
    Abba could have lived his life like this. Instead of running Reuben Katznelson Insurance with five branches in the greater Boston area, he could have stayed on the kibbutz and spent his days fixing fences. Picking oranges. Maybe milking cows.
    But he wanted to own his own house. He wanted to eat at his own dining table, line his own pockets with his own hard-earned money and raise his children in a melting pot. In the land of opportunity. In a country that wasn’t constantly defending its very right to exist.
    When we finish, Abba strips down and showers himself with the garden hose. I take in the stomach that’s now more flab than muscle. His pale and beefy back. The mole or two on his ass.
    I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in the world uglier than the sight of your own father’s pubic hair.
    “
B’seder
, Levi. Go inside and get me a towel.”
    For Abba, the immigrant, everything was turning out just fine for a while.
    He had the house and the dining table and the pockets. He had the American wife he’d met in Israel who would have stayed on happily but returned because it was what
he
wanted.
    He had the American sons.
    Then Boaz had to go and make his choice.
    And now I’m out here on a Sunday fixing fences.
    I dream of maps.
    Continents and oceans. States. Highways. Rivers. Places I’ve never been swarm beneath my closed eyelids.
    Maps. Maps. Everywhere maps.
    I’m desperate to understand his maps, but I don’t have the courage to ask, and anyway, Boaz doesn’t give me the chance.
    Why?
I want to ask him.
Why all those maps? What are you planning? Where are you going? Or are you just dreaming, like I am, of someplace else?
    We’re sitting at dinner with Dov when it strikes me.
    “I’ve been thinking about it,” I say. “And I think, maybe, I want to go to Oberlin.”
    Dov looks at Abba. “What’s this nice lady talking about?”
    “Oberlin. It’s a college, Dov. Hard to believe, but Levi’s almost a senior. He’s got to start